Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  In a great moment of self-reinvention, Chester had burnt his wig, and “talks about having a small cock + no pubic hair,” she wrote. “He has always felt hideous, + now he talks about it, wants to talk of nothing else.”12 In the summer of 1965, she visited him in Tangier, where he was living among the druggy gay expatriates in the circle around Paul and Jane Bowles. She was repulsed. “And I thought it was all a joke,” the author of “Notes on ‘Camp,’” still alternatively attracted and repelled, wrote in her diary. “That obsessiveness, that heartlessness, that cruelty. The international homosexual style—God, how mad + humanly ugly + unhappy it is.”13

  Things went wrong almost as soon as Susan set foot in Morocco. Chester became convinced that Susan was trying to steal his boyfriend, although he also proposed marriage to her. Susan confided to one of Chester’s friends that she had grown afraid of him physically.14 Chester wrote a friend in New York that Susan’s visit was, in a word, “catastrophic.”15 He became one of Susan’s harshest critics. “How dare you say ‘your friend S. Sontag?’” he wrote another friend. “You rat, she is my enemy. She is everybody’s enemy. She is The Enemy.”16 Elsewhere, he wondered “if Susan is really a rat” before adding, murderously: “I think she is just very much at home in the world.”17

  But Susan began to suspect that Chester’s attitude had nothing to do with distrust of her professional ambition, or her designs on his boyfriend. She noted the symptoms:

  “I feel the whole world is listening to everything I say”

  “Susan, what’s happening? There’s something very strange going on.”

  “You’re hiding something from me.”

  “I think I have syphilis. Or cancer.”

  “Susan, you look so sad. I’ve never seen you look so sad.”18

  He was, in fact, insane. Hearing voices, unable to write, chased out of Morocco, he died in Jerusalem six years later, aged forty-one, the neighbors alerted to his corpse by the baying of his dogs.

  * * *

  Eventually, after her trip to Morocco, Susan broke with Chester. But her journals from this time show that much of what attracted her to him was precisely his disdain for her.

  I always fell for the bullies—thinking, if they don’t find me so hot they must be great. Their rejection of me showed their superior qualities, their good taste. (Harriet, Alfred, Irene.) I didn’t respect myself. . . . I feel unlovable. But I respect that unlovable soldier—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honorable. I respect myself. I’ll never fall for the bullies again.19

  Many of the bullies, including Alfred, envied her. The timid, questioning soldier of her journals only appeared rarely to others, whom she struck as self-confident to the point of arrogance. But even as she was dependent on outside perceptions, they made only a glancing impression on her perception of herself. She was, she wrote, “eternally surprised at the malice . . . of people I haven’t harmed,” among whom she classed Alfred Chester.

  I was (felt) profoundly neglected, ignored, unperceived as a child—perhaps always, until or with the exception of Irene—Even persecution, hostility, envy seem to me, ‘au fond,’ more attention than I feel myself likely to receive.20

  Despite her successes, a sense of failure descended upon her; throughout her life, success would always unsettle her more than the failure her diaries reveal she thought she deserved. She was trapped, without past, present, or future. “She was not a woman with a past,” said her German publisher, Michael Krüger. This might explain her interest in modern art, he speculated: “The beginning of her career was modernism, which had wanted to break entirely with the past.”21 The Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk made a similar remark. Susan was “without history,” he said. “Susan rejected her history.”22 Of course, she had as much history as anyone else. But it is true that she had rejected her past, had difficulty being happy in the present, and was now finding it almost impossible to visualize, or to believe in, the future. When she left Europe, she was consumed with worry about the weighty steps she had to take upon her return to America. Now, her lacerating romantic impasses convinced her that her life was over.

  Have I done all the living I’m going to do? A spectator now, calming down. Going to bed with the New York Times. Yet I thank God for this relative peace—resignation. Meanwhile the terror underneath grows, consolidates itself. How does anyone love? . . . But I must not think of the past. I must go on, destroying my memory. If only I felt some real energy in the present (something more than stoicism, good soldierliness), some hope for the future.23

  * * *

  In September 1965, Susan returned to New York from Paris, unsure what to do with herself. She had a girlfriend, Eva Kollisch, whom she had met through another friend from the downtown scene, Joseph Chaikin, who had founded the Open Theater in 1963 and became one of the most attractive young figures in the experimental culture that galvanized Irene, Alfred, and Susan Taubes. Eva was a refugee, born and raised in Vienna. She had been a Trotskyist, was married, and had a son roughly David’s age.

  “I admired her energy and passion,” she said of Susan, “how much she could do. I found her very interesting, sort of wonderful and awful.” Soon after they got together in 1962, Eva struggled, like so many of Susan’s lovers, to escape. Susan seems never to have been entirely in love with her, Eva freely admitted. “I was never the important lover,” Kollisch pointed out. “I was never the high-up-intellectual-circles friend. I was a college teacher.”24

  Eva saw the struggle between Susan, the woman, and Sontag, Athenian paragon. This was the struggle “to be honest, just, honorable” that she described when she was fourteen, when she asked “when and if a person ever tells the truth.” Eva allowed herself to be enlisted in Susan’s dishonesty. As late as May 1966, though she was already one of the best-known young writers in the country, Susan was basically unemployed and considered finishing her Ph.D. She wrote to the head of the Philosophy Department at Harvard to ask permission to reenroll.25 She had to prove competence in two languages, and though she passed in French she got Eva to take the German exam in her place.26

  But the dishonesty she feared had less to do with cheating on the German test than with some fundamental fraudulence that was a source of constant suffering for those around her. Eva said,

  I’ve seen Susan in so many situations in which she could be really unkind to a person sitting right there and at the same time spouting very lofty ideals. I’ve never understood Susan’s self-image. Who is she? She was addressing herself all the time, “Am I living up to this? Will I?” But who was she trying to live up to?27

  As a teenager, Susan noted the damning presence of “that person who has been watching me as long as I can remember.” It was that admonishing shadow, that better self, of whose rigid exigencies she was always falling short. For a person whose education had taught her that any life short of the Socratic was a failure, and whose upbringing had instilled in her a tyrannical ideal of moral perfection, the desire for purity was an inspiration, but it was also a terrible oppression. “There was very little freedom in Susan,” Eva said. “It took away some of the joy to be with someone if you’re always thinking of your epitaph.”

  * * *

  “Susan was very interested in being morally pure,” Eva said, “but at the same time she was one of the most immoral people I ever knew. Pathologically so. Treacherous.” Without a Ph.D., Eva’s career could not progress. She had a child and made little money, so she decided to write a dissertation. “I’m going to get you a scholarship from the American Association of University Women,” Susan told her. This was the group that financed her year in England and France. “All I have to do is write them.” She never did. Recounting this betrayal half a century later, Eva was still hurt. “It really pains me,” she said. “There was something very wrong with Susan.”

  Susan’s strengths and charms depended almost entirely on her determination to vanquish her shortcomings. Her profound desire to escape the flaws she meticulously catalo
ged created a productive psychological tension. Without a keen need to improve, she would have ended up, like so many other ratés, nursing her bitterness in obscurity. “What’s wrong with projects of self-reformation?” she asked in her journals.28

  Sometimes her attempts at self-reformation struck others as forced. Susan’s indignation about Eva’s dislike of seafood stayed in Eva’s mind for the rest of her life, in part because it was such an odd thing to be incensed by. But Susan made a point of eating outrageous foods. During her first meeting with Stephen Koch, when he tried to impress her with his own esoteric selections, she wolfed down “hundred-year eggs,” a sulfurous Chinese delicacy. In Marrakech, with her girlfriend Nicole Stéphane, she appalled the elegant Frenchwoman by eating snails covered with flies, straight from a market vendor.29 She savored organs; she and Joseph Brodsky enjoyed chicken feet so much that when the dim-sum waitress failed to stop at their table to offer them more, they would chase after her cart.30 One acquaintance described watching her eat as “scary.” “I like excremental food,” she told Koch.

  In her journals, she listed intolerance of other people’s tastes as a fault of her own. She noted with disapproval “my indignation at Susan [Taubes’s] and Eva’s physical squeamishness.” She refers to her “ostentatious appetite—real need—to eat exotic and ‘disgusting’ foods = a need to state my denial of squeamishness. A counter-statement.”31 It was a way of separating herself from her fastidious mother: “Testing myself to see if I flinch? (reacting against my mother’s squeamishness, as with food).”32 Anything in Eva that reminded Susan of Mildred was attacked: “My mother had something beautiful (the Chinese furniture) but she didn’t care enough to keep it. Eva didn’t care enough about Kleist to buy his ‘Collected Works.’”33

  * * *

  Yet in some ways—including one very devastating way—Susan strongly resembled her mother. After her death, when her diaries were published, Don Levine was stunned to come across a phrase from 1962: “I wasn’t my mother’s child—I was her subject, companion, friend, consort.”34 He was astonished because the description so closely resembled the one Susan herself had used when, not long afterward, he tried to broach a delicate topic. “Susan, do you really think it’s such a good idea that you treat David the way you do?” he asked. “You don’t understand,” she answered. “David is my brother, my lover, my father, my son.” Don realized there was nothing he could say. He simply thought: “That’s going to be a disaster for him.”35

  Susan was young herself—in her early thirties—as David was entering adolescence. But her approach to raising him had long alarmed her friends. “Irene was jealous of David because that was the one part of my life she couldn’t completely take over,” she wrote in August 1965. “One thing I know: if I hadn’t had David, I would have killed myself last year.”36 The phrase echoes Mildred’s telling Susan that without her she would die. But Irene’s real desire to “take over” her relationship with David was similar to Don’s. She thought that Susan gave him a bad combination of too much latitude and too little attention, and told her so.

  That was exactly Eva’s opinion. “He was a very precious child and he had to adapt himself to whatever space she would give him,” she said. “I think she shortchanged him of a lot of love and affection.” The boy who was given the name of an image of Renaissance perfection was put in “a space with no baby. He had to be there at the ready to keep up an intellectual discussion with her. She was not there for him, and then she made demands on him pedagogically.” She forbade him children’s literature, insisting on Voltaire and Homer instead. “Always more, more. He had to improve his intellectual stature so he could be a companion to her.”

  That was the pattern she had first created when drilling tiny Judith on state capitals; or insisting that dyslexic Irene read more; or, later, berating Annie Leibovitz for her ignorance of Balzac. David was her child, entirely dependent on her, and the pressure was intense. Others saw what she intended as praise and stimulus as a crushing burden. Everyone agreed that David was intelligent. But was he, as his mother liked to proclaim, “the second-greatest mind of his generation”?37 “I thought it was awful,” Eva said of her treatment of David. “She thought she was the world’s greatest mother.”

  The strains began to show. At eleven, reading War and Peace, David despaired that “he would never write so well.”38 At thirteen, he was “an avid reader of books on the Boxer Rebellion and the Albigensian Crusade.”39 When Fred Tuten once came to visit Susan, David opened the door while she was getting dressed. “What are you doing these days?” Tuten asked, making small talk while Susan was getting ready. “I’m writing a novel about the Spanish Civil War,” David replied. Tuten wanted to laugh, but instead asked whether David had read Hugh Thomas’s book on the subject. “Of course,” said David.40 But if his interests were natural for a precocious boy, their display in the press reflected Susan’s need to present her son as a great intellectual—an extension of herself. In contrast to his mother, David was not ostentatious, particularly in high school: “His intelligence was never something that he wanted to be the first thing that you would see,” said a friend.41

  When he was little, David longed for attention from his itinerant mother. “She devised this phone, paper cups and string,” said Ethan Taubes, Jacob and Susan Taubes’s son. “She would say: Pull the string from my room to your room, you’ll know that I’m there. You won’t feel night terrors.”42 But she was not always there, even when not abroad or amorously intertwined. Once she told Don Levine that she had gone to pick him up from a visit to a schoolmate, and he was gobsmacked by this hitherto unremarked interest in parenting.

  This is not Susan. Why is she going to pick up her son? I didn’t say anything. When she came back she put David to bed and then she said, “Guess what? I knocked on the door. It was the Dakota.” I thought maybe that’s why. She wanted to be inside the Dakota. She knocked on the door, and who opened the door? . . . Of course she knew who was opening the door. Lauren Bacall.43

  Eva “loved David. I thought he was a very tender-hearted person.” (She added: “He would not recognize himself in that description.”) What Don found revealing about Susan’s oft-repeated comment about his growing up sleeping on a pile of coats at parties was not that she did it, “but that she made it a part of her told life, found it quite enchanting, exploited it.”

  Susan thought she was giving him the cultural advantages of which she had dreamed during her desert childhood. But the emotional landscape was the same. She had not had a father, and neither did David. Mildred left her daughters to travel; Susan did the same. Even when she was home, Mildred was often too involved in her own dramas to pay much heed to her daughters: Susan was the same, and it is remarkable how rarely David is mentioned in the roughly hundred volumes of her journals.

  Only when Susan seemed bound to leave did Mildred show how important she was to her. Susan, using her middle name, described this dynamic in an early piece of autobiographical fiction:

  When Lee was fourteen, her mother began to turn to her with a suddenly awakened flow of maternal love and dependence, and Lee fled home in guilt and anguish the next year to go away to college.44

  Once he grew old enough to leave her, Susan did the same to David. “Susan was not obsessed with me as a child,” he said. “She became much more involved with me in her head when I was a teenager.”45 Her hands-off parenting gave him enviable advantages. She left him all but by himself during her many long visits to Europe; he stayed with neighbors or friends.46 In ninth grade, indulging his interest in archaeology, she did not bat an eye at allowing him to travel unchaperoned through Peru with only a friend his age and “names of people to look up in Lima.”47 In high school, she let him travel with friends through Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. But in return for all Susan Sontag could offer her son—far more than “poor Mildred” could ever offer Susan—she determined to keep him by any means necessary.

  “She needed somebody,” Stephen Koch sa
id. “And that need extended to David to a sinister degree. She set out to see to it that he couldn’t escape her.” When he tried to get away, she said, “I’ll outflank him.”48

  * * *

  In early 1965, Susan began a relationship with Jasper Johns. Like many of the men she had affairs with, Johns was mostly gay; and as with most of the men Susan was involved with, the relationship was brief. And—as with all the men she was involved with—Johns was supremely talented: “My intellectual and sexual feelings have always been incestuous,” she said.49

  Johns’s philosophical preoccupations harmonized perfectly with her own—and, at least at first glance, with Warhol’s. Johns and Warhol were born to obscure provincial families within two years of each other. Both “arrived” on the New York art scene in the 1950s, and both stood firmly in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, who had plucked objects from the rubbish and placed them in the museum. Warhol painted tins of Campbell’s soup and bottles of Coca-Cola; Johns, Savarin coffee and Ballantine ale.

  But where Warhol refused interpretation—for him, a picture of Elizabeth Taylor was exactly that—Johns masked the “real” meanings of his paintings, which refused interpretation not because, as with Warhol, they had no hidden meanings, but because their creator refused to reveal them. “I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions,”50 he said of his early work. “Playfulness with masks” was the key to Susan’s own work, too.

  Painted in 1954, Flag came to him in a dream. “I have not dreamed of any other paintings. I must be grateful for such a dream!” he exclaimed in an explanation redolent of Hippolyte. “The unconscious thought was accepted by my consciousness gratefully.”51 Seen up close, the apparently straightforward image dissolves, and all one can see behind the paint are newspaper clippings. The attentive viewer will try, and fail, to piece them together, as one might try to connect the mysterious objects in a Joseph Cornell box. The only entirely comprehensible symbol is the flag itself, one whose clichéd familiarity let Johns focus exclusively on painting it, forcing the viewer to try—and fail—to discover some other meaning beyond the obvious symbol. “It remained the most interesting point about Johns,” the critic Leo Steinberg wrote, “that he managed somehow to discover uninteresting subjects.”52 For Susan, this uninterestingness was a virtue, implying a refusal of the easy accessibility she associated with commercial entertainment.